How much is 104 bits?
It's about 0.000000003 times as much as an HDTV Television Show (30 Minutes)
The amount of an HDTV Television Show (30 Minutes) is about 36,200,000,000 bits.
(a.k.a. High Definition television, a.k.a. HD) (digital signal, QAM-256; 30 minutes)
Broadcast cable HDTV signals contain about 20,100,000 bits of data per second, or 36,200,000,000 bits in a thirty-minute television show. The first High Definition television broadcast was news footage from John Glenn's 1998 mission on the space shuttle Discovery.
It's about 0.00000002 times as much as a Compact Disc
The amount of a Compact Disc is about 6,185,000,000 bits.
(80-minute, 360,000 sector disc; "Red Book" specifications)
A typical, 80-minute capacity compact disc, commonly known as a 5,872,000,000 bits disc will actually hold 6,185,000,000 bits of data. Such disks are 1.2 mm (0.047 in) thick.
It's about one-four-hundred-fifty-thousandth as much as The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The amount of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is about 44,000,000 bits.
(ASCII, plain text)
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare would occupy about 44,000,000 bits when written in plain text without formatting. These works include 38 definitively-attributed plays — 11 tragedies, 17 comedies, and 10 tragedies — as well as 154 sonnets and numerous other poems.
It's about one-two-hundred-fifty-thousandth as much as a MP3 Song
The amount of a MP3 Song is about 30,000,000 bits.
(a.k.a. MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, a.k.a. MPEG-2 Audio Layer 3) (128 Kbps, "near-CD-quality"; 3 minutes duration; average)
A three-minute song of typical quality will be about 30,000,000 bits when encoded into MP3 format. The song Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega was used by AT&T-Bell Labs engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg to test the compression process and is considered the first MP3 song.
It's about one-one-hundred-thousandth as much as a Digital Photo
The amount of a Digital Photo is about 13,000,000 bits.
(5.3 megapixels, JPEG compression, 100% quality, 24 bits/pixel)
A 5.3-megapixel digital camera photo requires about 13,000,000 bits of storage space. In 2010, it was expected that 90% of all professionally-taken photographs would be digital instead of film.
It's about one-one-hundred-thousandth as much as a Floppy Disk (3½-in)
The amount of a Floppy Disk (3½-in) is about 11,796,500 bits.
(high density, IBM PC format)
Despite common reference to them as "1.44" megabyte (mB) disks, the actual capacity of the most common model of a 3&-in (8.9 cm) floppy disk is 11,796,500 bits. At the height of their use 1996, there were an estimated five billion disks in use — nearly one for each person on Earth at the time.
It's about one-two-hundredth as much as a Page of Text
The amount of a Page of Text is about 19,000 bits.
(50 lines, 50 characters per line, ASCII encoding)
A 50-character-per-line, 50-line page of Latin alphabet text requires 20,000 bits when digitally represented. The Google Books project, which has produced hundreds of millions of pages of digital text, used a robotic device to digitize over eight million titles at a rate of about 1,000 pages per second.
It's about one-tenth as much as a Magnetic Stripe Card
The amount of a Magnetic Stripe Card is about 800 bits.
(maximum capacity; per ISO 7811 specification)
The storage capacity of a magnetic stripe on a credit or identification card is about 1,000 bits. According to legend, Forrest Parry, the IBM engineer who developed the first magnetic stripe card in 1960, was able to solve the problem of adhering the strip to the card after his wife suggested using an iron.